MyFaireLady

9-13-07: I feel like I should be on Dr. Who…

As some of you may already have read, I’m in the process of making my own reproduction of the gown QEI wears in her Ditchley Portrait. I’ve already made a satisfactory French Farthingale, so the next task was to come up with some nice “Farthingale Sleeves” to go with the outfit, but how to make them…I’m not SCA, don’t have access to libraries with great resources…all I’ve got is what I can research online…and create in my mind.

So, I put on my thinking cap, sharpened my pencil, and set to work. I had already despaired of finding anything online that was remotely useful for my needs. Most of the sleeves I came up with were bombasted to pouf them out. I didn’t want to be dealing with all that stuffing (read: heat) next to my skin. I needed to come up with something that was going to be light and as cool as possible to wear. Strict authenticity was not crucial, though I wanted the final product to support a look as much like the one in the portrait as possible.

These basic details having been decided on, I put my drafting skills to work and set about to create a two-part sleeve that would be held in shape by modern-day reeds (read: plastic trimmer wire). I ultimately wound up adding some cable ties in the topmost tiers for extra strength there, since that part of the sleeves would have a significant amount of weight on their shoulders (pun intended). I decided to make them attached to a body of linen so that I can wear them with more than one outfit, though I might wind up detaching them and making them up separately so that they tie onto the inside of the gown’s sleeves. I’m still working that part out.

Anyway, here are some pictures of what I have so far:

And here’s a close-up of one sleeve:

So, what do you think? Let me put the two silhouettes side-by-side…

Hmmm…I think it’ll be ok, though the sleeves look a bit wide around the elbow…like they should taper down more severely…it could also be an illusion due to the netting material allowing the structure to show through. I think I’ll make a mock-up pair of sleeves out of cheap muslin before I start tinkering with the actual sleeve farthingales. They just took too long to make to mess them up now!